Five Key Concepts for Autistic Linguistic Justice: Securitization, Revitalization, Rights, Planning, and Ethics

This perspective article draws on my own lived experience as an autistic person, combined with my academic research at the intersection of languages and politics. My main aim is to suggest a new interdisciplinary approach to autistic communication that aims to accommodate our different communication styles rather than modify our communication to fit non-autistic communication norms. I call this new interdisciplinary approach ‘autistic linguistic justice’, and introduce five concepts to help initiate research and advocacy on this topic. The concepts I introduce are: the sociolinguistics of securitization, language revitalization, linguistic human rights, language policy and planning, and language ethics. Each concept is briefly introduced, and examples are given of how they can be applied to accommodating autistic communication. In the conclusion, I provide recommendations for how families, practitioners (such as teachers and doctors), autism researchers, and autistic people can use these concepts to help build autistic linguistic justice together. Given that many of the concepts I draw on have been developed by other minoritized communities, I emphasize the need for building respectful and mutually beneficial solidarity with these communities.